Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Are creationists arrogant? A review of King Crocoduck's series: Part 2

In
the second video of King Crocoduck's (who I refer to as, KC for the
sake of economy) video series, he deals with the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. It's a difficult video to critique because KC makes
very few arguments. Instead, he spends most of the 13 minutes of the
video making assertions like (paraphrasing), “Creationists are
stupid, they don't understand anything, they hate science, etc.”
He does show a couple of very short clips of creationists mentioning
the law but he doesn't really expound on how he thinks anything
they're saying is wrong. He merely plays a clip and then insults the
creationists as being stupid.

Let
me start by making an admission. I'm sure that most creationists
can't name all the laws of thermodynamics. I'll also admit that most
creationists' understanding of the second law is grossly simple.
Let's face it, most people aren't physicists. By the way, that also
includes most people who believe the secular theories of our origins
– those who are usually called, evolutionists in this debate.
Neither do they fully understand the second law nor can they name all
the laws of thermodynamics. It's a fact that most creationists went
to public schools and learned science while sitting right next to
evolutionists. I would say the average lay-creationist understands
science about as well as the lay-evolutionist. The simple summaries
of the first and second laws that KC cites in his video (i.e. "matter
can neither be created nor destroyed"), weren't invented by
creationists but are the explanations we were taught in science
class.

Of
course, being untrained or unlearned doesn't automatically mean
“wrong.” No one is an expert in everything. Lay people can have
opinions – even correct opinions – in areas where they have
little training. It's not enough for KC to say that creationists
hate science and don't fully understand the second law of
thermodynamics. He needs to demonstrate precisely how natural
processes can allow something like abiogenesis in spite of the second
law.

KC
spends some time explaining the second law of thermodynamics. He
begins by talking about the flow of heat. Heat is a form of energy
that can be directed to do work. KC offers the example of a piston.
Of course, no system is perfectly efficient so as energy is used to
perform work, some of it is expended and becomes “useless.” Over time, all the
available energy will be spent and work can no longer be performed.
This is why perpetual motion is impossible; new energy must be
continuously added to any system or it will eventually fail.

The
second law is sometimes called, the law of increasing entropy.
KC objects to calling entropy, disorder because he thinks
that term is too vague (just like he thought the term, nothing
was vague). He explains his objection beginning about 5:55 into the
video by describing what should be the presumed fate of the universe.
Eventually, all usable energy will have been spent and all the atoms
in the universe will be motionless, suspended uniformly throughout.
KC's point is that such an organized arrangement of matter could
hardly be described as, chaotic,
so chaos and disorder
are misleading terms to use when describing the second law.

Let
me pause for a moment and remind everyone what KC said in his first
video. He asserted that, in accordance with the first law of
thermodynamics, energy was eternal. There, he chided Tom the
Creationist saying, “I've already explained
how something can come from nothing [no he didn't by the way]
and, until you explain exactly why the second law of thermodynamics
prohibits the universe from having always existed, you have no case.”
Um, KC? Did something come from nothing or has everything always
existed because you seem to be saying both here? Anyway, in this
video, KC says, “Because of the second law
of thermodynamics, the universe will eventually use up all of its
available energy and will lose the capacity to perform work.”
So, in KC's own words, if all the energy in the universe were
eternally old, it should have reached total entropy already.

Now,
getting back to what we were saying about disorder: KC claims the term, disorder is, “no
less arbitrary that 'ooga booga'”
(see slide at 4:29). It's ironic then, that Ludwig Boltzmann, the
man KC practically venerates later in the video as the patron saint
of entropy, is sometimes described as, “The
Master of Disorder.” Per Wikipedia,
“The
idea that the second
law of thermodynamics or
"entropy law" is a law of disorder... is due to Boltzmann's
view of the second law.”
So the use of the word, disorder to describe the second law was not
coined to, “allow
creationists to commit as many fallacies of equivocation and goal
post shifting as desired”
as KC alleges.

The
Master of Disorder
article cited above offers these definitions:“Order
means
that there are very
few configurations,
if
changed, which would go unnoticed. Disorder
means
that there are many
configurations,
if changed, which would go unnoticed.”Boltzmann
noted that, since there are far more combinations of disordered
arrangements possible than ordered arrangements, any system will
either be in disorder or moving toward disorder. He called
organization, “infinitely
improbable.”

Boltzmann likened gas molecules to billiard balls moving around on a table. At any given moment, they are far less likely to be ordered (as in a rack) than disordered (spread randomly around the table). When we see things in the universe like design, purpose, order, fine-tuning, or pick your adjective, creationists acknowledge that as evidence for a Designer. Per the second law, we see an ordered, organized universe being the result of random, un-directed energy is, "infinitely improbable."

KC
also spends a good amount of time explaining how the earth is
receiving more heat (energy) from the sun than it emits. In his
typical, over-dramatic voice, he exclaims, “[Creationists]
can whine. You can kick and scream. But the inescapable fact of the
matter is that we receive more useful energy than we expend.”
It's curious because KC includes a clip where creationists are
admitting the earth receives energy from the sun – they're not
whining, kicking, or screaming but never mind that. What KC fails to
explain is how having available energy – by itself – can create
order.

Let
me give you an example: a living system is all about organization.
You can have molecules, amino acids, and even proteins, but you won't
have a living cell unless these things are organized a certain way.
If you apply heat to amino acids, will they become more or less
organized? In order to convert energy to work, you need something
like an engine. Plants, for example, are like machines that can
convert sunlight to food. The problem for evolution is that the sun
shining on lifeless chemicals won't produce plants. In fact, the
second law seems to argue against it. Heat applied to chemicals will
tend to make them less
organized! So KC really does nothing in this video to rebut the
creationists' position or even explain how having energy from the sun
helps his position.

KC
spends the last few minutes praising the work of Boltzmann. He makes
him out to be some sort of martyr. I don't know what Boltzmann's
views on God were. It's my understanding, though, that he was likely
bi-polar and was driven to suicide in large part because of criticism
from his peers. Even so, I'm not sure what any of this has to do
with creationism.

Over
all 5 of his videos, KC continuously commits the fallacy of
conflating evolution
with science
as though they're the same thing. I don't know of any creationist
who has a problem with science. There are – and have been – many
scientists who believe God created the universe. People like Newton,
Pasteur, and Mendel, and Kepler immediately come to mind. Even
today, Drs. Ben Carson and Raymond Damadian are admitted, young-earth
creationists. Now, I'm not saying that these people's belief in a
Creator made them better scientists. I'm saying that they have all
made great contributions to science – they're belief in creation
not withstanding.

The
images of toothless men in overalls and the endless barrage of
juvenile insults made by KC are arguments I would expect to see on
the playground of an elementary school. They do nothing to support
his premise that creationists are arrogant. Conversely, KC's
prolific use of scientific jargon is nothing more than smoke and
mirrors used to dress up his empty arguments. KC's entire series can
be summed up with this analogy: Imagine an 8-year-old bully in the
3rd
grade telling a 2nd
grader, “I'm
a scientist. You're a poopy head.”

2 comments:

It's not enough for KC to say that creationists hate science and don't fully understand the second law of thermodynamics. He needs to demonstrate precisely how natural processes can allow something like abiogenesis in spite of the second law. ... What KC fails to explain is how having available energy – by itself – can create order.

He isn't asserting that. The origin of life is an unsolved problem, but it's an unsolved problem whose solution apparently lies in the laws of chemistry, not just in having available energy. His point is that the second law of thermodynamics does not say that it is impossible. It does not say that one cannot go from a less complex or ordered state to a more complex or ordered state: if it did, then even the Urey-Miller experiment would go against the second law -- and I assume you concede that it did not. It cannot say that increases in complexity require the input of intelligence, because it says nothing about intelligence, or apply only to situations without intelligent input. This isn't "smoke and mirrors;" this is telling you what the law says and what it does not say.

I could go into more detail on why the second law of thermodynamics doesn't prohibit actual "monad to man" evolution once life exists, but you've restricted yourself to abiogenesis and do not even seem to argue that the 2LoT somehow would prevent fish from evolving into giraffes and swans and people.

So, in KC's own words, if all the energy in the universe were eternally old, it should have reached total entropy already.

I confess I didn't watch the first video. But if a system isn't doing work, it need not increase in entropy; he may be contemplating an eternal pre-existence of the initial singularity (he probably isn't contemplating something like the proposed ekpyrotic universe's conjectured system for "squeezing out" accumulated entropy at each Big Crunch).

So the use of the word, disorder to describe the second law was not coined to, “allow creationists to commit as many fallacies of equivocation and goal post shifting as desired” as KC alleges.

I don't believe he does allege that it was coined for that purpose; only that creationists prefer to use it for that purpose. Again, I point to the Urey-Miller experiment. It does exactly what you say cannot be done: produces more complex systems from less complex ones when undirected energy is input. You can argue, of course, that such experiments do not adequately represent the actual conditions that could actually arise anywhere in the primordial universe -- but that, again, is an argument different from the one you're actually making.

Over all 5 of his videos, KC continuously commits the fallacy of conflating evolution with science as though they're the same thing....

I will stipulate (and I suppose KC would stipulate) that some (many? most?) people compartmentalize, applying scientific methods to some questions and rejecting the scientific method in others. I rarely find creationists whose insistence that we cannot use the scientific method to study unique, unobserved past events carries over to the work of, say, medical examiners or NTSB crash scene investigators.

But the distinction between "observational science" and "origins science" (as though anyone were interested merely in how things worked in the lab, without assuming that, e.g. the tensile strength of some alloy in the lab would be the same in a bridge twenty years from now, or twenty years ago), or that all "historical science" depends on arbitrary, faith-based assumptions that cannot be overturned by evidence, is as anti-science as anything can get, at least in the fields where one decides to apply that distinction.

Yes, it is arrogant to insist that, on the basis of vague definitions and intuition, one can overturn the conclusions of people who have vastly more knowledge of a field than one has oneself. Laymen might, by chance, be right where the scientific consensus is wrong, but they would not be justified in assuming that they are, or even that they probably are -- there are far more ways for ignorance to guess wrong than to guess right.

I suppose a number of scientists have managed to avoid research in areas that might challenge their creationist beliefs, or where their refusal to admit that certain kinds of evidence might exist doesn't touch on the sort of evidence they encounter in those fields (e.g. Carson and Damadian). In the case of Newton and Kepler, they simply didn't have enough evidence to indicate the falsity of creationism, so they had no reason to reject it. In the case of Pasteur and Mendel, it was a bit of both.

RKBentley

About me

I'm a husband, a father, and a Christian. Being a Christian is not something I do on Sundays but rather it is who I am. My faith influences everything I do. Christians are commanded to always be ready to give an answer – a reason for the hope that is in us. I take that command seriously. Psalm 19:7 says that the testimony of the LORD is sure. If we base all of our thinking on the Bible, we can't go wrong. I started this blog to encourage other Christians and challenge critics on a variety of issues. Whether you agree or disagree with me, you're welcome here. Please follow me on Twitter and friend me on FaceBook! God bless!!